The
purpose of these pages is to provide original texts of papers which I deem critical to the
understanding of some major problems in the biomedical sciences. Many important papers,
often neglected by modern readers, date from the 19th century. The original versions are
not always well presented (small text, no headings, etc.). Modern technology allows these
relatively inaccessible texts to be made available to a world audience in an attractive,
searchable, format.

To
the extent that there is a hidden agenda, it is to show that, for the biological sciences,
the key concepts were advanced in the 19th century. Ewald Hering and
Samuel Butler in the 1870s introduced the idea of heredity as information
transfer and, building on Darwin's
"pangens", De Vries (1889) postulated differential gene expression and transfer
of information from nucleus to cytoplasm. This anticipated the discovery of messenger RNA
in the 1950s. Romanes solved speciation in 1886 and we are only just beginning to catch
up. We have been so busy filling in the details that we have forgotten about the big
picture.

Acknowledgements. Some of the material on the pages listed
above has been published in various journals, which are the only definitive repositories
of the content that has been certified and accepted after peer review. Copyright and all
rights therein are retained by the associated publi shing houses. Single
copies may be made for personal use, but multiple copying or reposting requires explicit
permission of the appropriate publi shing house. Acad emic Press offers on-line
access to all or part of some of these papers through "ID-EAL"at http://www.idealibrary.com.
Else-vier offers a
similar facility Click
here. See also Else-vier's Gene Homepage (Click
Here). Copyrights eventually expire and it may be safely assumed that the nineteenth
century papers on these pages may be freely copied.

This page was established in 1998 and was last edited
22 March, 2015
by Donald Forsdyke. The evolution of this and associated pages, with
successive updates since circa 1998, may be examined by going to the Internet
Archives - The Wayback Machine (Click Here).
"Snapshots"of the pages for the Q-Space Archive were taken in
February 2005
(Click Here) and May 2007
(Click Here).